There is wind, drying brown leaves blowing, that kind of bright yellow sunshine that only comes on the chilly perfect days of autumn. I could and should be outside for hours every day. Instead we are all on Facebook and Huffington Post and 538.com. Last days. For the moment, reality-based democracy seems to have it in the bag, but we are looking for constant confirmation. And what about the Senate? And the House? I found myself calmed somewhat yesterday-- oddly-- by politely conversing a while with someone who holds diametrically-opposed opinions to mine. We were civil. The world did not come to an end. Let's not let this Trump campaign be the end of civility.

Emotionally, too, I've been blown by gusty winds this week: full of grievances and questioning the motives of everyone. Food, as always, is my touchstone. This week in recipes:

Mridula Baljekar:

Spicy Grilled Chicken, served with Saffron Rice and salad. As always, I am having trouble finding links to Baljekar's dishes online. "Spicy Grilled Chicken" is a terribly generic name and there are a million kinds of saffron rice and Baljekar seems to have published several different versions of all her dishes in various cookbooks which all bear similar names. The one I own (Best-Ever Curry Cookbook) seems to be one of the less common ones. So, I shall describe these dishes to you. The Spicy Grilled Chicken consisted of chicken thighs marinated in lemon, ginger, garlic, chilis, sugar and honey, treated with cilantro and more chilis, and then broiled, or in my case baked at a high temperature, because my broiler is unusable. It was perfectly fine-- flavorful enough chicken pieces, without sauce, but that was OK because a) the chicken was thighs and wouldn't dry out, and b) the saffron rice had its own flavor. The saffron rice, which was simple basmati rice cooked with cardamom, cloves, and saffron, and a little milk, was also fine. I felt that it had more saffron than it needed (1/2 tsp.), and would have been fine with less, which is an important point given that saffron is sometimes said to be more expensive than gold (my research suggests that this is not currently true. But still). I am a much bigger fan of Baljekar's cookbook now than I was a month ago, but-- while both of these dishes were solid enough-- neither one was anything special.

​Madhur Jaffrey:

Peas with Ginger and Sesame Oil, served with bulgogi-and-sweet-potato omelets and toast. Because it is October, and because it is difficult to find shelled fresh peas in any season, I used frozen peas for this recipe and the next. These peas were extremely simple: basically stir-fried with ginger, sugar, sesame oil, and toasted sesame seeds. I felt that the result, given recipe instructions, was too heavy: too much salt, too much ginger, too much sesame. You don't normally hear me complain about "too much ginger." An easy but not particularly well-balanced recipe.

Three omelets in the making.

Toasted sesame seeds.

The Green Peas with Coconut and Cilantro were better. I used fresh basil leaves instead of curry leaves, as suggested, and-- not as suggested-- substituted coconut butter for the grated fresh coconut, because the fresh coconut I'd bought turned out to be rotten inside. Which I discovered when taking a drink of the coconut water I drained into a glass before breaking the coconut open. Anyway, while the coconut butter made these peas very rich, they tasted delicious. Mustard seeds, cumin, chilis, turmeric, and dried coriander augmented the fresh cilantro and basil and the strong coconut flavor. We served this dish with grilled cheese sandwiches and some roasted potatoes, sweet potatoes, and turnips.

Bon Appetit:

​Hot Sausage and Crispy Chard Pizza, served alone on a plate with a side dish of heavy skepticism. WTF, Bon Appetit. So, sausage-and-chard-pizza sounds really good, right? And this recipe from Bon Appetit simply directs you in topping a lump of pizza dough that you have purchased from the refrigerator case in the supermarket. Easy-peasy. Okay, now you go home and try to fit all this on a single pizza: 3/4 lb. sausage, an entire bunch of barely-braised Swiss Chard, 1/3 c. parmesan, 1 c. Fontina, 1 c. ricotta. It may not sound like a big deal-- it didn't to me, either, before I actually started pre-cooking the sausage and chard. But it is actually ridiculous. Before cooking, the pizza-with-toppings was probably about 3-4 inches high, almost all sausage, chard and ricotta. After cooking-- when the chard had settled down-- it was more like 2-3 inches. It was a big pile of food loosely arranged on a crust. Fortunately, it was not actually inedible; it was just not pizza. And the weight of toppings was so great that the crust really didn't rise at all. My revised recipe: try 1/4 c. sausage instead of 3/4 c., use a smaller "bunch" of chard (or a partial bunch) and cook it down significantly (and squeeze out liquid) before putting it on the pizza, and use way less ricotta. I spent a lot of time laughing at this pizza. I wanted to see what others thought about it on the Bon Appetit website, but their comment section seems to be missing.

Topping, part 1: cooked sausage and chard stems.

Topping, part 2: barely wilted chard leaves.

Topping, part 3: now we have added the cheeses.

After baking.

The Internet:

Frozen Coconut Limeade, from Smitten Kitchen, consumed after dinner while watching the latest episode of this terrible season of Survivor. Normally I love almost everything Deb Perelman does (and normally I love Survivor), but this beverage was about as lackluster as the show we were watching. It was like we were just pretending to be festive on both fronts. I added extra lime and sugar to my drink, but it still seemed to me bland and excessively icy. To be fair, husband and kid said it was good, but maybe that's because I don't normally fix them tropical iced beverages to drink while they watch TV.

The week in cooking featured a series of uninspiring vegetable dishes, one utilitarian but oh-so-necessary french chocolate cake, and a kick-ass delicious Indian meal from Mridula Baljekar, who is swiftly redeeming herself.

​Mridula Baljekar:

​Chicken in Green Masala Sauce, with Nut Pulao (also from the same cookbook, but no link available). Gradually I am becoming sold on Mridula Baljekar. These were both amazing recipes, and I'd be happy to make them again and again. (In fact, I have already made a pared-down version of the Nut Pulao again this week.) The sauce for the chicken, made from blended yogurt, ricotta, spring onions, coriander, mint, green chilis, garlic, ginger, and (surprisingly) green apple, was both easy and incredibly flavorful. Then the chicken was basically just cooked in the sauce, no weird parboiling necessary. The rice for the pulao was fried with onion, carrot, and garlic, and then cooked with vegetable broth and spices. Walnuts and cashews were added at the end. It was sweet and fragrant and delicious, although I felt it stood on its own so well that it did not need to be swamped in green masala sauce. In the future I'd make the chicken with plain white rice, and the pulao with something simpler. I'd make both for company, happily.

Stages of pulao.

Green sauce, happening.

Now with cilantro and raisins!

Blended.

Madhur Jaffrey:

Fried Okra with Onions, which we ate with hummus-and-za'atar toasts, cooked carrots, and apple slices. The okra (and onions) were greasy and not recommended. So far I have not had a lot of luck with the idea that shallow-frying (or deep-frying) okra will make it crispy. That said, frying with lots of hot oil has never been my forte.

Batter-Fried Okra, which we ate with baked sweet potatoes from the farm, nut pulao #2, and fresh pineapple. This was the first okra recipe that my husband just plain refused to eat. He had been a good sport up until now. I did not find it inedible (at least the batter bits got crunchy, if the okra didn't), but also did not see the point of it. At all. I was also confused by Jaffrey referring to these as "fritters," when they seemed to be just bits of deep-fried okra. I will say, I had to use frozen okra for both of these recipes, and so was not able to slice it thinly lengthwise the way this recipe called for. I don't know if that would have made a major difference in the result.

Okra, in batter.

Sweet potatoes.

​The Internet:​

Valerie's French Chocolate Cake, from Smitten Kitchen. I made this on Wednesday night, so that we could eat it while we watched the third presidential debate. The idea is to ward off evil influences per Lupin's wise advice. To this end, while I only made a single layer of this rather simple cake-- full of butter and chocolate but with a mere 1/3 c. flour-- I also made a great deal of chocolate whipped cream (who knew you could make chocolate whipped cream? A revelation) and dolloped it heavily on top of our plain bittersweet cake slices. The dementors certainly did their best, but we and Hillary Clinton prevailed. How was the cake? Fine. Nothing special. My kid, who had bizarrely decided to drink a double espresso at 5:30 that evening, was not able to fall asleep after the debate until 1 am, and so spent the next day shoveling slices of chocolate cake into their mouth to try and keep their energy up. So it served its medicinal purpose twice.​Bon Appetit:

Cauliflower with Pumpkin Seeds, Brown Butter, and Lime, served with marinated grilled tofu, plain quinoa, and cooked turnips. I like roasted cauliflower, as I like most roasted vegetables. Did I find roasted cauliflower to be markedly superior when dressed with pumpkin seeds, red pepper flakes, cilantro, and lime juice? Not really. Enough said. The turnips were better and I just cooked them with salt, pepper, and butter.

Like everybody else, I need wholesome distractions from the fascinating, disgusting, outrageous, wanton nonstop train wreck that is Donald Trump. Cooking is one of them. Others include mystery novels and going to my day job. Also, like Hillary Clinton, I spend a lot of time watching cats (in my case, I have one in the house who does very well). This week in cooking:

The Internet

Sunken Apple and Honey Cake (Smitten Kitchen). When I find a really simple, delicious, visually-amazing dessert that comes out perfectly, I immediately begin to fantasize about making it for company. Deb Perelman's Sunken Apple and Honey Cake is company cake. (Or, it could be company breakfast cake, served with brunch.) The crumb is somehow dense and light at the same time, while the apples and honey syrup give it a beautiful moistness. I found some tiny Lady apples at the Whole Foods, and these were ideal to quarter (the apples were too small to core whole and then halve, as per the recipe instructions) and slice thin into the decorative apple fans you see in the photos. They also had great flavor. We ate two slices of cake each upon its debut, leaving only a quarter of the cake for lunchboxes the next day. It was so, so good. If you want to dress it up for company, I bet a bit of whipped cream wouldn't go amiss.

​Bon Appetit

Classic Potato Gratin (Nov. 2015). This was a time-consuming recipe-- between making the garlicky sauce, slicing 4 lbs. of potatoes very thinly, and a long baking time-- that was not really worth the result. (I did not use a mandolin to slice the potatoes, as history suggests I will merely slice the end of my finger off and any time "saved" will be squandered in bandaging.) The flavor of the potatoes was good-- garlic, butter, thyme, cream, cheese!-- but, even with a longer browning time than called for, they were only barely crispy on top, and quite mushy on the inside. I could make creamy garlic potatoes a lot more easily by, say, mashing them. If you do make this recipe, I would recommend removing the foil from the pan earlier in the baking process, in order to let the potatoes dry out and crisp better. We ate them with brussels sprouts and salmon filet (my kid) or sausages (my husband) or both (me).

Who needs a mandolin?

​Madhur Jaffrey:

Fried Okra with Fresh Curry or Basil Leaves, served on the side with slices of parmesan-covered toast, pears and raspberries. A strange recipe: the okra (I bought fresh this time) was sliced very thin, fried without breading in a lot of oil along with basil leaves, and then blotted, spiced and salted. It did not become crunchy, although it seemed to me that would have been the only point of such a procedure. Instead, the okra darkened, shrunk to a tiny wizened size, and tasted salty/spicy. Once it had shrunk, there was not a lot of it left, rather like cooking a bunch of spinach. It was not bad, neither was it good. As a treatment of okra, it left me somewhat mystified.

Okra with Tomatoes, served over toast with scrambled eggs on top (my kid had cooked mustard and turnip greens in place of okra). This was basically cooked okra with some tomatoes, garlic and spices added. A good shot of lime juice gave it a pleasant bite as well. While not earth-shattering, this was a more logical way to serve okra than the above method. I would skip the eggs and toast next time and simply serve it as a regular vegetable side dish.

​Mridula Baljekar:

Chicken Saag, served with packaged naan and topped with plain yogurt and chili powder. A mixed review for the Chicken Saag. It tasted wonderful and my husband loved it. But, as may be seen from the photos, my sauce ended up as thin as a soup, not the thick spinachy paste pictured in the cookbook or familiar from Indian restaurants. Now, in retrospect, this is not surprising, since 8 oz. of spinach, 4 tomatoes, and 1 cup of water (plus seasonings and chicken), cooked with the cover on as directed for about 30 minutes, are unlikely to produce a thick sauce. Why all that water? Is that an error? But we ate it anyway, enthusiastically, with spoons to consume all the tasty broth and naan for dipping. The leftovers were even better the next day. Even now that all the chicken is gone, I still have about 2 cups of leftover sauce in the refrigerator. I guess we'll just have it as a soup.

The spinach puree, shown here being added to the tomato sauce, was so, so green.

Maybe it's something about fall. There is so much pleasure in stocking one pantry and refrigerator, looking over the stores of apples and onions and sweet potatoes and jars of grain, the cheeses and eggs in their dozens. I want abundance and then I want to use those things so neatly and sparingly, feeding us delicious food now but yet also preserving that sense of abundance for the colder weeks ahead. Such a squirrel instinct.

​Madhur Jaffrey:

Okra with Potatoes, served with whole urad beans and white rice. I am the only person in my household who likes okra, and we have three weeks' worth of okra recipes from Jaffrey ahead. More for me! But it turned out my husband consented to try this dish, a heavily-spiced Indian stewed version of okra which was highly flavorful, except that I forgot to add the salt until the last minute and so it did not have a chance to infiltrate the potatoes. I also used frozen okra, but, surprisingly, this seemed to work out fine. Recommended-- if you like okra.

Okra Cooked in an Australian Manner (how's that for a recipe title?), served atop quinoa in a bowl which also included cooked sweet potato, with a dish of Sweet-and-Spicy Mixed Nuts (see below) on the side. This okra is basically stir-fried with chile, garlic, soy sauce and sesame oil; my handwritten cookbook note reads "Okra cooked in a boring manner." I mean, who needs a recipe for that, right? All the same, as I single-handedly consumed the rest of this okra over the next few days, it grew on me each time. The slices of gently-cooked garlic that still retained lots of garlic flavor were the best part. Once again, I used frozen okra, and once again it was fine. Easy, albeit intuitive, preparation.

Bon Appetit:

Sweet-and-Spicy Mixed Nuts, served with the meal described above. I kept having to stop myself from referring to the flavor combinations in this recipe as "nuts." Maple syrup, rosemary, red pepper flakes, and smoked paprika? Really? And you know what? The first nut or two struck me as "weird." After that I was totally hooked. These are so, so addictive, sweet and savory and spicy and beautifully glazed so that sometimes they even form delicious crunchy clusters (!). You should make these for your family, or maybe for holiday gifts. Wait, I should make these for holiday gifts.

The Internet:

Deb Perelman's Coconut Brown Butter Cookies. Apart from the extra time required for the first step (browning the butter, then chilling it until solid again), these cookies were simple and very tasty, if a bit sugary. Even though there is a large amount of coconut (the big crispy flakes) in the recipe, and this coconut is unsweetened, the relatively small proportion of flour still made these cookies taste extremely sweet. Not in a bad way, but in a way that might deter you from eating too many in a sitting. I'd make them again; and, if I had a lot of people to serve, I might double the recipe, which is relatively modest in quantity.

​Mridula Baljekar:

Chicken Tikka (this recipe is almost but not quite identical), served with lettuce, raw rings of onion, lime, cilantro, and white rice. Next time I would serve it with naan instead, as the chunks of chicken are flavorful enough to make an excellent sort of sandwich, but not very saucy. This recipe is obviously a cousin to last week's Chicken Tikka Masala, but did not call for a "boughten" (as my Midwest relatives say) spice packet. It still came out good. That's two winners in a row for this cookbook, after several initial failures. I am heartened, though in a way also disappointed that I can't just write it off and move on-- I have so many cookbooks and my life is, optimistically-speaking, about half over! I won't get to them all!

Suddenly I feel as though cooking from recipes, something I've let slide a bit lately, is of the highest priority, even while I'm letting other priorities rest awhile (gulp, writing). I make extensive lists, I shop, I cook things. I take photos here and there, but record few notes. This is my best skeletal reconstruction of the cooking extravaganza of late September, 2016:

Madhur Jaffrey:

Three Kinds of Mushrooms served atop Pan-Fried Noodles and some marinated tofu. I could not find fresh lo-mein noodles for the noodle recipe, but used Korean fresh noodles of a medium width, and they seemed to work fine, although I think I overcooked them a bit. My family really liked the slightly crispy nest of fried noodles as a starch base instead of rice. I would do this again (and probably will-- the noodles come in a big package). For some reason, out of the Three Kinds of Mushrooms called for in the recipe, Jaffrey specified for two to be canned (the oyster mushrooms and the abalone mushrooms). Since I am not crazy about canned mushrooms, I was also not wowed by this dish. It was okay.

Portobello Mushrooms Stuffed with Bean Curd, served with Simple Pumpkin Soup and Artichoke Heart and Fresh Fava Bean Salad. I will say, this was an impressive dinner: a kind of vegetable tapas, light overall, but each component requiring extensive crafting. Especially the salad-- prepping fresh artichoke hearts and fresh fava beans for one dish that ends up making enough to serve two fleas? But oh, it was a delicious small plate. The pumpkin soup, strangely thin even though I put in about twice as much pumpkin as called for, tasted much, much better than it looked. I would suggest a creme-fraiche-and-herb garnish, and maybe a bit more potato to thicken the soup. It is an easy soup, though-- recommended with the above tweaks. The stuffed portobello mushrooms, supposed to be the star of the meal, ended up being the least interesting of the three dishes. The bean curd filling was bland unless you poured a bunch of sauce all over it, in which case you had sauce running all over your plate and into your fava beans, so serve this on a separate plate if you make it. I've just realized I missed Jaffrey's instruction to toast the sesame seeds immediately before adding them to the sauce, so that they are still hot and sizzling. Perhaps a more intense sesame flavor might have made a big difference to this dish (but I doubt it).

Making the filling for the portobello mushrooms.

The artichoke heart and fava bean salad.

​

Mushrooms with Coriander and Cumin , served with pita bread, cheese, and spinach salad. My family loves mushrooms, and these were both easy and flavorful. I used white mushrooms. As usual with Indian vegetable recipes, there is no skimping on the aromatics and spices. A very satisfying meal.

Mushroom and Potato Stew (I can't find a link to this one), with tofu added, atop white rice and with spinach-and-avocado salad. This stew-- no cuisine listed, so probably one of Jaffrey's personal recipes-- was pretty bland, even though it smelled great, what with all the mushrooms, aromatics, rosemary, and wine. It also needed a longer cooking time than specified and more salt (but I have already commented many times about the apparently random salt quantities called for in this book's recipes-- the cook should always follow their instincts rather than the recipe here, especially if the amount of salt seems too much. It often is, spoiling the dish).

Karahi Chicken with Fresh Fenugreek, with rice. I have no photos of this dish or its prep, but I can tell you it was boring. I did use dried fenugreek, which the recipe suggested as an option, and perhaps fresh fenugreek would have been more flavorful. As it was, the chicken was perfectly edible but not interesting in the least. It also featured, again, the technique in which the chicken is boiled first before stir-frying, a method which makes the chicken dry and flavorless. That's recipe four from this book. I announced afterwards that Baljekar has two more chances to impress me: if those recipes fail too, I am giving up.

Chicken Tikka Masala (this link is a slightly modified recipe, but close), with naan from the store and steamed broccoli. Baljekar wins herself a reprieve. This dish was actually quite good, despite the fact that I don't have a grill and my broiler (located underneath the oven, practically on the floor) is too dusty and gross to use, so I roasted the chicken pieces in the oven before adding them to the sauce (no pre-boiling, though!). However, the recipe called for a packet of Chicken Tikka paste (like this) from the Indian grocery store, which I bought, and perhaps it was this packet that was responsible for the positive results. Actually, previous recipes had also called for such packets, I think, but I was unable to find the right ones, so tended to try and improvise my own. Basically this seems like buying a packet of taco seasoning to make your tacos-- it tastes good, but can you legitimately put it in a recipe? Anyway, we liked the Chicken Tikka Masala. I'll give the book a little more time.

​Bon Appetit:

Gluten-Free Chocolate Tea Cake (November 2015). This cake tasted good-- very chocolate-y-- but had very little structural integrity. The whole thing began to crumble into pieces as I removed it from the pan. On the other hand, my cream of tartar proved to have expired 8 years ago, and my egg whites didn't want to whip properly, so... readers, would this account for the problem? I don't know, and it never occurred to me that cream of tartar might expire. I'll give Bon Appetit the benefit of the doubt... but I do see that some others had the same problem. We certainly ate this cake anyway.

However, the Seeded Whole Grain Soda Bread (November 2015) also fell apart coming out of the pan, due to sticking on the bottom (this despite the fact that I'd greased the pan with a lot of butter). I'd recommend a piece of parchment paper for this one. The bread-- which contained millet, quinoa, amaranth, oats, flaxseeds, and sunflower seeds, as well as lots of whole wheat flour-- was very hearty and tasty. We tried it with various accoutrements, but decided that cream cheese and lingonberry jam was the best topping. Served with some baked apple slices and currants (for the purpose of using up a bag of mushy, not-really-autumn-fresh apples from the Whole Foods).

The Internet:

Whole Grain Cinnamon Swirl Bread from Smitten Kitchen. I was impressed with this bread purely because it was a 100% whole-grain bread that actually rose properly and worked effortlessly. That is to say, I would have considered it a major success even without the cinnamon swirl. The kneading technique was much different than I am accustomed to-- a lot less kneading, a lot more resting-- and (besides being great for lazy people) this reduced the need to keep adding extra flour. So the dough was wetter than I am used to, and it was so much better. I may need to rethink the way I usually make bread. That said, the cinnamon-and-currant swirl was nice too. I think I would have preferred to go all out and add more of the filling-- it was kind of only half-sweet. Great for buttered toast, though.

​

Pork Sausage with Coconut-Chile Sauce and Lychees from Epicurious (although apparently this also derives from Bon Appetit, September 2014). This dish was... interesting. The recipe doesn't call for any kind of starch base, even though you'd think it might be served with rice, so I cooked some more of my fresh Korean noodles from the refrigerator to create a noodle bowl. On top were spicy ground pork, fresh herbs from the Thai palette, roasted peanuts, onion, lime, and... canned lychee fruit? All served with a really delicious spicy coconut sauce. Oddly, like the reviewers on Epicurious, I found that I liked this dish but would not necessarily make it again. The lychees in it were good, but strange. The pork sausage was tasty, but did not seem to belong in the Thai-ish dish-- chicken or shrimp would have clashed less with the other flavors, I think. I do love a noodle bowl, though.

​I cooked a small flurry of recipes over these few days, during which I also waitressed at the restaurant a lot, attended the wedding of an ex-waitress with a number of my current and former colleagues, and finally collapsed in a heap with a $5 download of Civilization V (2010).

The nice thing about cooking is that it is a constant, a daily reference point even in a whirlwind of other business, work, events, errands, moods, and crises. I may not always cook something elaborate, but I usually cook something.​So. Friday night, after a hard day at work, I made the Korean Barbecue from last November's Bon Appetit, using thinly sliced pork loin, lettuce leaves, and some store-bought kimchi, with brown rice and farm tomatoes on the side. Neither of my other family members like kimchi, so I put out some sriracha too. Oh, plus frozen crabcakes for my child who does not eat pork. The food was fine, nothing to get excited about. I eat better Korean marinated beef (though not pork) regularly at work. That said, spicy pork in a lettuce wrap with kimchi and rice is just inherently nice. An everyday-dinner idea to keep in mind.

Sunday night, Madhur Jaffrey's Spicy Kohlrabi with Corn, served over white rice, with fried eggs on top to provide some protein. With fresh August sweet corn cut from the cob and ripe farm tomatoes, this spicy-sweet kohlrabi was really flavorful, and the rice balanced the spiciness nicely. We inhaled this. I also made a side salad of romaine lettuce, carrot, green pepper, and mango. The mango was an inspired touch, with dressing made from the white balsamic vinegar left over from the strawberry cake.

​Monday, Mridula Baljekar's Karahi Chicken with Mint, served with brown rice and a side of roasted vegetables (cauliflower, eggplant, peppers, carrot, onion). While the chicken dish had a really nice flavor-- lots of scallions and cilantro, mint, lemon, ginger, tomatoes, dried chiles-- the cooking instructions called for it to be boiled first in plain water-- for 10 minutes!-- before being stir-fried with the other ingredients. This led to the chicken pieces themselves being dry and bland. While I know that some cuisines do use this boil-then-fry technique more frequently, I was not a fan of the results in this case. That's three recipes so far in this cookbook (Best-Ever Curry Cookbook) that I would consider unsuccessful. I'll try two or three more, but if I don't hit a winner by then, I'm giving up on it..

Wednesday night, the second of Jaffrey's kohlrabi recipes, Spicy Kohlrabi Stew with Tomatoes. This was sort of an odd dish, with large, 3-bite-sized chunks of kohlrabi boiled together with a lot of tomato and modest seasoning (it was distinctly less spicy than the Spicy Kohlrabi with Corn), becoming a bowl of big-veggies-sitting-in-broth that required both a spoon and a fork to eat. The idea was to serve it with a lot of fresh flatbread and some store-bought hummus, but the flatbreads I bought that afternoon were already moldy inside (thanks, Community Food Co-op! I would not call you out except that this happens all the time), so I had to improvise. We had multigrain English muffins, hard-boiled eggs, and celery sticks, with some hummus to add to any or all of these. It was a weird meal.

On a Tuesday evening, my husband and I went out to Capital Fringe to see my stepson's girlfriend perform in Over Her Dead Body, an 80-minute theater piece composed of bluegrass murder ballads, with full bluegrass band and five top-notch singers (including my stepson's girlfriend, who has a beautiful, deep, North Carolina voice-- and somewhat macabre sensibility-- perfectly suited for the material). I would have loved this even if a family member were not performing. I would have seen it again. (But it is sold out.) I hope they are able to take this show further than Capital Fringe, because it is wonderful. Review here. (Update:Over Her Dead Bodywon Best Overall show according to the audience awards, and is moving on to the Millenium Stage at the Kennedy Center! See video here.)

After the show (which, due to tight Fringe scheduling, was at 6:30 pm), husband and I were trudging back up Florida Ave., to the nearest Metro station which is over a mile away, and wishing we would encounter something for dinner. It was still light, the most amazing huge orange sun setting over the city street. Only a single restaurant offered itself, but its board outside proclaimed $2.75 tacos, so I convinced my husband it was a good idea. It was. The Far East Taco Grille. Far East? Tacos? Maybe just because it was on the east side of the city?

Nope. In some ways these are conventional tacos: you choose flour or corn tortilla, several types of salsa are available. But the fillings are things like Korean short rib, spicy pork, tofu. Topping styles include a kimchi version. Clearly this is a Korean-fusion joint, just like where I work, only so different. Better. Though the menu is more limited and it is just counter service. I order two tacos: flour tortilla, short rib, "#15 sauce," banh mi-style toppings. Short ribs cost $0.25 more each for tacos, so this meal cost $6 altogether, and it is perfect. So, so good. The short ribs are tender and delicious (better than those at our restaurant, maybe even better than the ones Scarlet made for me), the #15 sauce (whatever the hell that means) is a sweet and spicy Asian-influenced sauce, I suspect involving gochujang, and the banh mi toppings are pickly, spicy, sweet. Total flavor bomb. I think it would be overwhelming to eat more than two. My husband ordered more conservatively, as he always does: spicy pork in a rice bowl with their simplest topping option of lettuce, cheese, and lime crema. He said it was very good too. In total we paid $20 (including a tip, which would be optional here) for one of the best meals I've had in a while. I have no idea how they can make any money at all, charging $3 for tacos containing a substantial amount of expensive short rib, but GO THERE while it lasts.

Next day. I've finally had time to organize my recipes and do a more extensive shopping trip at the Whole Foods, so (after a long, busy day at work) I have three dishes planned to cook this evening. One is my second effort from Mridula Baljekar's Best-Ever Curry Cookbook, the Tandoori Chicken. This time I buy the appropriate amount of chicken, and actually look up the spices involved in tandoori masala. So I believe myself to have followed the directions fairly well. I did blend my own tandoori masala out of spices I already possessed, instead of buying a prefab paste, so it's possible I missed out on some ingredients that might have been present in the paste... sugar, perhaps? Because my chicken tasted nothing like what you get in an Indian restaurant. (Perhaps it is just more authentically North Indian, as it appears in that section of the book.)

​Anyway, I managed to skin my whole chicken myself (with painful slowness, using kitchen scissors), a feat that used to be quite ordinary for home cooks, but of which I now feel inordinately proud. It marinated for two hours in yogurt mixed with the tandoori spices, then roasted at a high temperature (475 degrees) for about 30 minutes. Simple enough, except the chicken was not done after 30 minutes. It looked quite done on the outside, but close to the bone it was still soft and pink. Returned to the oven and eaten after 15 more minutes, the cook on the chicken was still only barely adequate. Another 10 minutes would have been better.

While the chicken was marinating, I made the Buttery Cayenne Pecans from the October 2015 issue of Bon Appetit. These were a simple matter of melting butter, stirring in Worcestershire sauce and spices, tossing with the pecans, and roasting. Kind of like the chicken, actually. But more successful. The one problem did not lie with the recipe: the pecans themselves were not very good. I bought them in a package from Whole Foods, and they had the bitter aftertaste and discomfiting mouthfeel of unripe fruit. The flavor was worse when raw, but they retained some of their bitterness even after roasting.

Finished pecans.

​The third recipe was intended as the final Pie-of-the-Month for my husband, and was from this month's Bon Appetitvia The Bitten Word. The Bitten Word guys had made this Blueberry and Corn Crisp, and concluded that it had potential, even though it seemed not to have enough corn in it, and the topping did not brown well. They discussed the desirability of trying it again with double the corn, and a blast of higher-temperature baking in hopes of achieving a true "crisp." So I made the recipe myself, incorporating these tweaks. Nope. Before baking, I had a full 1-inch (or deeper!) layer of corn-y crumbs on top of the blueberries. During baking, almost this entire layer sank into the bubbling berries, leaving only a little topping peeking out. Even that didn't brown much. So, to the extent that there was any perceptible crumb topping at all, it was mushy and dissolved in your mouth (and not in a good way). Definitely not "crisp." The corn kernels (whose quantity I had doubled) simply dropped out of the topping and mixed with the blueberries, creating a somewhat odd fruit filling instead of a cornbread-y crumb. Your experience will probably not differ, as other Bitten Word commenters seemed unhappy too. It was not inedible, but I can confidently fail to recommend this recipe.

Making the cornmeal crumb.

​All in all, it was a disappointing dinner. The pecans were all right.

June 8The usual kind of before-work morning. Breakfast is lemon water, coffee with half and half, and a smoothie made from grape juice, goat kefir, hemp protein powder, almond butter, dates, strawberries, blueberries, and CSA lettuce. I really need to use up some CSA lettuce.

At work, I have a cup of decaf coffee in the morning when it is slow, and a cup of regular at noontime. After that, it gets busy, and I forget the fact that I am hungry.

Back at home, 3:00, it is time for lunch: leftover pasta from last night, a slice of multigrain toast with melted swiss cheese. Decaf coffee with half and half.

I have arranged to meet my husband in Silver Spring for a movie this evening. I leave some Whole Foods sushi for my kid to eat for dinner, and plan to meet my husband at the Panera by the movie theater at 6:30. However, the metro is experiencing big delays because of repairs, and my husband is late; I end up eating at Panera by myself. I have a whole-grain bagel with cream cheese and tomato, and a decaf coffee which I end up hardly drinking. I get another bagel for my husband and hide it in my purse for him to eat during the movie. Once we get to the theater, I also buy us a bag of Reese's peanut butter cups to share. The movie is rich in melodrama, and by the time we leave we are exhausted.

​After an afternoon of shopping at REI and some other places, including Giant, I come home and have some decaf coffee and talk to my kid. Also, I eat the last four mini-Reese's peanut butter cups over the course of the afternoon and early evening.​Shopping (Giant): 2 packages English muffins, free-range eggs, lactose-free 2% milk, 8 AA batteries, natural dish soap, Cascadian Farm oats & honey granola, coconut water, tart cherry juice, bananas, 3 small yellow mangos, salted cashews, 2 pints blueberries. $48.

About 5:30, in the midst of my cup of decaf, I start dinner and dessert more or less simultaneously. I am making the Mushroom and Burrata Lasagnette from October's Bon Appetit (the recipe also provides for a kale salad on the side), and Molly Yeh's recently posted Whipped Yogurt Cheesecake with Roasted Rhubarb, which my husband has selected (loosely) as his "pie-of-the-month.". Bon Appetit has listed their lasagnette in a group of dinners-for-two ("You and Me"), and then gently given away that it does not fit there ("Listen, this dish is indulgent, and makes a bit more than two responsible adults should finish in one serving. But for crying out loud, live a little.") It seems to me that you would have to live a lot. I planned this meal for the three of us, and it still looks like too much lasagna to me. Maybe four servings with just kale on the side, or six with additional side dish(es)? Whatever. They had to make it fit their gimmick.

Burrata.

Up close and personal.

​Making dinner is a little bit of a whirlwind, what with trying to prep the lasagna and prep the cheesecakes at the same time. Poor planning. I do manage to fit in a glass of red wine, and my husband calls to say he fell asleep in his office chair and will be late, so everything works out okay.

​Okay, 1/4 of the lasagna apiece, which is what I plated up, is still too much. I finish my serving but am overly full. Half the lasagna, which is the serving generously suggested by Bon Appetit, would have covered an entire dinner plate. Maybe hung off the edges a little. Are they nuts? The flavor is pretty good, not amazing. It is a fairly dry lasagna. I would like more sauce, some form of moisture. Also more salt, but that is my own fault. I should have put more salt in the ricotta. The raw kale salad is chewy.

As for dessert, which we eat not long afterwards, it is okay, but I am not wildly thrilled with it. Once again, Yeh's dessert is very low on sweetness (even though she refers to the 1/2 c. of sugar added to the roasted rhubarb as an "ass-ton"). The only part that is distinctly sweet is the crumb crust, and that, due to the addition of what seems to me like too much coconut oil, has become a kind of hard brick at the bottom of the glass instead of a crumbly layer. I have to stab at it, hard, with my spoon in order to break it up. Visually, though, the layered glasses are very pretty. I will have to try a few more of her recipes, but I am wondering if the gorgeousness of her blog means that her interests lie more in design than in flavor. Design-wise, her website is my very favorite!

In the wee hours of the morning, my throat is really scratchy. It's too close to alarm-clock time to take an antihistamine, so I go into the kitchen for half a glass of full-fat milk, which usually helps. Pour it in the dark, take a couple of big swallows before brain catches up with mouth to figure out what is wrong. The milk is really thick, tastes bitter. It's gone sour... really sour. I don't drink milk much-- this carton is more or less allocated to my kid-- but how have they not noticed before now?? Uck. I rinse out my glass, pour the carton of whole milk down the sink, take a little of the lowfat lactose-free stuff to wash the flavor away. It helps enough that I can get back to sleep for a couple more hours.

​May 29Breakfast: lemon water first; then a cup of coffee with half and half. Finally, about 9:45 (it's Sunday), I make smoothies for my husband and I: carrot juice, hemp protein powder, avocado, plain yogurt, a few strawberries, a peach, and farm red leaf lettuce. This tastes like a liquid salad. The farm lettuce has a lot more flavor than the romaine I buy at the store.

About 11:45, we decide to head downtown to get brunch at my restaurant. I have an omelette with crab and spring onions inside, broccoli on the side, and an English muffin with butter and jam. 2 cups of coffee with half and half, first a decaf and then a regular. My husband also chooses with careful restraint.

Then we go to the farmer's market, just across the street, where the holiday weekend has made things quieter than usual. It is nice to be able to wander the stalls without the claustrophobia sometimes inherent in fighting one's way through the happy crowd. I buy one big kohlrabi, a paper bag of shiitake mushrooms, a little basket of sweet potatoes, a basket of strawberries, 4 Gold Rush apples (always the first and best in the early summer here), and a bag of kale. We also taste some local wines, then decide on a bottle of hard cider, as a gift for my stepson's girlfriend next time there is a suitable occasion. She likes hard cider and dislikes beer. Total purchases about $40.

In the afternoon, before a 4:00 yoga class, I have a cup of green tea and prepare the Vegan Chocolate Tart with Salted Oat Crust from October's Bon Appetit magazine. It will need to chill for a while, and we'll have it tonight for dessert. The tart is fairly simple to make; I don't have a tart pan, but it works fine in a springform with the crust pressed a little ways up the sides.

Oats 'n' things.

Recipe instructed the cook to melt and then slightly cool the coconut oil before mixing the crust. This is how my coconut oil looked straight out of the cupboard. It is hot in my kitchen.

Crust.

Stirring the chocolate.

My homemade vanilla!

The oat topping.

​Dinner, after the yoga class, is the Egg Tartines with Asparagus Pesto, Dijon and Pickled Shallots from Smitten Kitchen, with a small fruit salad on the side made of orange, peach, and strawberry. I am the only one who has pickled shallots on my tartines. They are good, but their salty vinegariness does kind of overwhelm the subtle flavor of the asparagus pesto. I think I might dial down both the salt and the vinegar next time (and/or use a better vinegar). Still. I like the tartines a lot.

Shallots pickling in the refrigerator.

Included for realism. I do not have a lot of counter space and my appliances are all lined up in a row, except the toaster oven, which is on the opposite counter. Finished tart shares space with incipient tartines.

​For dessert, while we start watching The Force Awakens (my kid has seen this on their own and is really excited to share it with us), we eat small pieces of the chocolate tart. It is incredibly rich and intense, so small pieces are exactly what we want. The chocolate is so, so dark, and the coconut oil with which it is blended is so smooth. Totally decadent. I will save another piece each for tomorrow, then take the remainder to work.

May 30Memorial Day and another work day for me. An ordinary breakfast: lemon water, coffee with half and half, a smoothie made from carrot juice, hemp protein powder, canned coconut milk, plain yogurt, farmer's market strawberries, and CSA farm red leaf lettuce.

Then I go to work, and work I do, very hard. It is busy from the get-go. I do manage to drink a cup of decaf coffee with half and half, over the course of the day, but it is so busy that I forget to offer my coworkers any of the chocolate tart that I have brought and left in the refrigerator. Tomorrow. I leave a little late, about 2:45.​At home, I make coffee, eat a lunch of leftover pasta with oregano pesto and the other half of my tuna melt from Saturday night. After that, I have a cup of peppermint tea. I am exhausted, more than I realized while I was actually working. And sore, and I have cramps and my whole body hurts. Especially and also feet. Eventually I recover and start working on dinner, which has to be begun early, because the beans need long cooking.

Oh, and when I got home from work, my kid was baking. They were making vegan cookies (their girlfriend is vegan) frosted in the colors of various Pride flags. 4 rainbow, 3 non-binary, 3 trans, 3 pansexual, and maybe one or two other things, I forget. Tomorrow is the end-of-year party for the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at their old middle school, an organization my kid and her girlfriend personally started last year. The club is still going strong, and my kid will be paying a guest visit, with cookies.

Possibly inspired by those juggling balls, on left?

​Dinner is Madhur Jaffrey's Spinach with Tomato (Saag) recipe, some black beans with Indian-ish flavorings, whole wheat pitas, and plain yogurt. The black beans are still a little undercooked by the time we eat; also, I added too much seasoning, I feel. My kid, however, says they especially like them. I'm glad to know they (the beans, not the kid) are not inherently unpleasant. The saag has a good flavor. I've used a couple of the fresh onions from the farm, complete with scapes, instead of yellow onions. I'm always stunned, though, at how much spinach has to be purchased in order to make a substantial spinach dish like this. For the saag, which made about 5 decent side-dish servings, I used some spinach from the CSA farm in addition to 2 full 1 lb. containers from Whole Foods. Those are the big containers. The smaller boxes and bags are typically 5 oz. Over $10 worth of spinach. I guess that is still only $2/serving, less than you would pay in a restaurant... but somehow painful when you are laying down $20 on spinach on a single shopping trip (there is another spinach recipe to come, later in the week).

​In the evening after dinner, while watching the rest of The Force Awakens, I eat my second allotted piece of chocolate tart.

I make an appointment for kid at the orthopedist and we go there mid-morning. They confirm that the bone looks fractured, but not too badly. Talk about a cast, but decide on just a splint at the last minute. It's the left arm, thank goodness, and it should only take a few weeks for this minor crack to heal.

He is lurking around every corner.

As we are driving back from the orthopedist's office (which is all the way in Germantown, 40 minutes away), I say to my kid, "You know it's been a tough week when your mom takes you out to lunch in the middle of the day... TWICE." Kid laughs and agrees. Then I take them to lunch, a low-key affair at the Woodside Deli. I have a grilled Swiss cheese sandwich with sauteed onions and mushrooms, on rye, with a cup of matzoh ball soup. And coffee. Kid has french toast with strawberries, and lemonade. Still a kid. We leave prematurely, half the french toast in a to-go box, because some man near us has begun talking loudly about Donald Trump and immigration policy to any table that will listen. When we get to the car, kid says, "gosh, that guy sure was nativist!" I didn't know they knew that word.

A note about pronouns. I am trying to use the "they" construction here on the blog, because it is kid's preferred form at the moment, and this is a public space, and it's good practice. I will say that I totally suck at it in real life, when speaking-- it's all "she" this and "her" that-- so nobody give me any Parent-of-the-Year awards just yet. I want to do and say the right thing, but somewhere on the way from my brain to my mouth, "she" jumps out anyway. Especially when there are other matters to think about at the same time, such as broken arms. I hope to improve.

Then, despite having just eaten lunch, I eat the whole bag of kimchi tortilla chips. I don't even like them that much. I also play Civilization while eating the chips, instead of writing, which is what I should be doing. I am at the end of my rope. The thought of doing anything else this afternoon is overwhelming. I even fall asleep, though only for ten minutes.

Dinner: somehow I manage to get back up and cook. First I make the Caramelized-Honey Nut and Seed Tart from October's Bon Appetit. The tart dough calls for a food processor, but I use my fingers and this works fine. For the mixed nuts and seeds, I use almonds, cashews, peanuts, and pumpkin seeds. This color mix is so, so beautiful, with the reddish color of the almonds and the green of the pepitas. Really I think I made this tart in the first place because the magazine photo is so gorgeous. I take pictures of the nuts in every stage until the battery runs out on my camera.

For actual dinner, I make Smitten Kitchen's Three Pepper Shakshuka Pita with Feta and Za’atar and Madhur Jaffrey's Spinach with Sorrel. Sadly, neither came out all that well. The Whole Foods was out of pitas (!-- out of spinach and pitas in one day?), so I bought lavash, which obviously don't make convenient pockets, and I ended up serving the shakshuka in the more conventional little dish with bread on the side. Also-- as several commenters suggested-- my eggs took a lot longer to cook than Perelman's did. This may be about pan depth, or what we mean by "medium-low" heat. Anyhow. Neither of these things are major problems, but the fact that the shakshuka didn't taste all that good was a major problem. I really like shakshuka. I wanted more-- much more-- seasoning: more salt, more za-atar, perhaps some other elements that were missing. As for the Spinach with Sorrel... well, it tasted truly weird. Not like sorrel, which has a lovely sour lemony taste. Maybe it was the fact that I was forced to buy frozen spinach, or that for $6 at the Whole Foods I could still only buy 1/4 of the sorrel the recipe called for... but neither of these things seem to me to explain the odd, almost bitter flavor. Also, I really do not prefer spinach cooked to be as mushy as Jaffrey's generally is. Half an hour of spinach cooking, really? Left to my own devices, I generally do about two minutes.

For dessert, we ate the nut-and-seed tart, even though by then, thanks to the entire bag of kimchi chips, I was so full I was about to die. The tart was good overall-- and so beautiful!-- but the crust needed work. A mouthful containing too much crust became bland, floury, and crumbly. If I were to make it again, I would add more salt and sugar to the tart dough, as well as probably more butter. ​Snacks: 3 other cups of coffee, 1 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half. I have run out of beer and wine that needs to be used up, which is probably a good thing.